


The Torturer's Horse

by Vehemently



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-14 02:46:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4547211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.</p>
<p>Steve visits a museum.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Torturer's Horse

"About suffering they were never wrong," says Steve Rogers to the painting in front of him. The little boy in green, staring blankly out at him from the canvas, says nothing. Steve sits down. He is very tired. He has been looking a long time.

It's a Wednesday morning, dim and dripping. Not many people are in the gallery; maybe the British don't do school trips the way they do in America nowadays. Or maybe they don't do them on Wednesdays. Or in the winter: hopefully they spend their precious sliver of sunlight outdoors, and only go to art galleries at night. 

It's a Wednesday morning and Steve is enforcing rest on himself, because he's not stupid and because he knows what Sam will say. He hasn't been back to London in decades, and it's not exactly fair to compare this London to the one Steve knew: almost four years into a bombing campaign, most of the nicest art boxed up and safely stored in a cave somewhere. The streets are smooth now, and the piles of rubble tidied away, and the only uniforms are on the doormen at the hotels. The city seems fantastically wealthy, like Manhattan, and sometimes Steve wonders where the snot-nosed, muddy-legged, cobble-throwing kids of today must live: somewhere else, obviously. Maybe in caves.

The little boy in front of him stares on. He's wearing shiny silk, which seems like a waste on a little boy. He's only going to tear out the knees and get dirt on his behind. He has his mother -- his aunt? his sister? -- by the end of her diaphanous white shawl, and tags along where she leads. She is twisted to look over her shoulder, cradling the baby, a shocked expression on her face. The boy's face shows nothing. He is on his toes, trotting to keep up, and will be off the canvas into safety in only a few more strides. He has just stepped over a dead soldier.

Steve takes a breath. Someone is standing behind him, on the far side of the room, at a location Steve guesses is exactly where Steve himself realized the little boy in green was staring. It was probably done with a model, some kid or even a young woman posed for hours and staring into the painter's eyes. Two paces to the left or right and the little boy isn't looking at you, only outward, at nothing. In just the right place, his emptiness is all your own.

"Believe it or not, that's American," Steve says, without turning. His eyes roam the canvas. The lifted bayonets at left and the flags at right act like tentpoles for the drama in the center. Steve could lift his hand and draw triangles of legs, postures, the ardent lunge of the black man with the feathered hat (why he doesn't get a uniform is unclear, but if you have to fight a street battle in cream-colored britches, you might as well get immortalized for it). The dead Major Peirson, slumped in his followers' arms. The redcoats, upright and laid low, right and left. The French soldiers in the background, shot at point blank range. "The artist, I mean. John Singleton Copley."

The person in the room makes a neutral noise. Maybe Steve shouldn't have been surprised. Copley must have been a Loyalist, if he came to Britain in 1775 and never went home. This isn't his only work portraying redcoats as heroic figures. It's a little funny, to see those redcoats from the other side of things. It's a little funny, to see an American artist given pride of place in a British gallery.

"I didn't even know France tried to invade Jersey. Um, the British Jersey, not the American one." Steve clears his throat. "Um. The plaque says Major Peirson was 24 years old, but it's kind of hard to tell with everybody's hair powdered white."

Behind him the person he's talking to crinkles a brochure, breathing a little hard. The idea springs into his head at once: how can it not? He has been looking for so long. Of course it's not so, but the idea springs into his head all the same.

"I was older than that when I went to war." Steve pauses, and controls his voice. "And I think, I think -- why is it called _The Death of Major Peirson_ when you can see two other corpses on the canvas? Look at that guy in the left-hand corner, holding a silk scarf against the hole in his chest. It's his death too, and he matters just as much."

"Mm," says the other person in the room, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. It's possible the person he's talking to never learned any art history, or forgot it all. It's possible Steve is just talking bunk, and smart people know when not to disagree with him.

And the little boy in green silk. Steve's eyes return to him. The little boy with the curly brown hair, his terrible eyes, the way he doesn't even look at the dead body beneath his feet. That tight grip on the back of his mother's shawl. He mumbles to himself, "Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course."

The voice when it comes is accented, quiet: "You are quoting someone."

It's not a low playful tenor from Brooklyn. It's not even the screaming hysteria Steve had been halfway expecting, that dominates in his mind when he lets himself think about it. It's Wanda Maximoff, of course, and her Slavic consonants. Steve has heard that accent in New York -- now New York, but especially the New York of old -- and even in his disappointment it feels like home. He turns.

She looks nothing at all like James Buchanan Barnes. She is wearing a red overcoat and a jaunty little plastic backpack slung over her shoulders, a moist brochure in her hands. Her hair is piled up on the top of her head, except where wet tendrils drip onto her face. She must not believe in umbrellas. 

"Auden," Steve agrees. "He's -- he was -- very popular when I was younger. I had a friend who liked his poetry very much."

"Auden," says Wanda, as if she's never heard of him.

"Poetry is the way to a woman's heart, he used to say. My friend, I mean, not Auden." Wanda is peering at him with that peculiar cocked-head expression of hers. Maybe she's reading his mind. Steve adds, "I think he only said that to cover for the fact that he really liked poetry. I liked it too: it was good, political. You know, important. More than it is now, I guess."

"Sam sent me," says Wanda. "You are wanted."

"He was British. He moved to America before the war began. Auden, I mean, not my friend." And wrote about New York, Steve remembers that. How thrilling it was when he described something real, that Steve had seen with his own eyes. "Only fair. The Brits got Copley, after all." 

Wanda doesn't smile at his little joke. She rarely smiles. Right now she is staring over his shoulder, intent. Her hands don't move: you can't read the minds of people who don't really exist. She gazes on and does not blink.

"The child," she says, dreamlike. 

Steve does not need to turn and look again. "Yeah. It did the same thing to me." He takes a breath, stands, and readies himself. Sam wouldn't have sent for him if it wasn't urgent. The thing about monsters is you never run out of them.

"He lived, you think?" Wanda crosses the gallery to stand beside him, her heels loud on the wood floor. She is facing one way and Steve the opposite way, and Steve decides this must be on purpose. He listens to her breathing and the squeak of her rubbery-plasticky backpack straps and the click of her eyelashes against each other. She says, quiet: "I think he lived."

The little boy in green silk has to walk past a dead body, clutching at his mother's shawl, all day and all night till the end of time or of museums. His blank face will never get relief, and to his right at center canvas the Major and his nameless men will die continuously till the vermillion of their uniforms dries and cracks and rots away. The French troops will never recognize that they're frightening a little boy, and apologize and get back in their boats to go home. Frozen in his moment of unease, the child will never let go the shawl and recognize that there was nothing he could have done except what he did do. The little boy will never grow up and read in the papers about Yorktown, Austerlitz, Waterloo.

Wanda Maximoff probably never wore a suit of green silk. Steve gets the general sense that they were poor before their country fell apart, and poorer afterward. Her brother wore ratty sneakers on the day he died, though Hydra surely could have afforded new ones for him.

"About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters," Steve recites to her. He ducks his head. He has been looking too long. "Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course, um, something something, while the dogs go on with their doggy life --"

Wanda frowns. "Rembrandt is an old master. Rubens, Velazquez. Titian. Renaissance, all those naked people, with the muscles. This? This is war propaganda."

Steve chuckles to himself. "We can argue art history after you brief me on the mission."

"You'll lose that argument," she says, and turns to lead him forth from the gallery, down into the echoing Neoclassical atrium, and finally out into the rain. Steve doesn't have an umbrella either, and they both are dripping by the time they reach the waiting Quinjet.

**Author's Note:**

> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/John_Singleton_Copley_001.jpg
> 
> "The Death of Major Peirson, 6 January 1781" by John Singleton Copley (1783). It's probably not actually on display in the Tate, but they own it.
> 
> http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html
> 
> Full text of "Musee des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden (1938)


End file.
